Currently, many individuals, households, and businesses utilize computing system implemented financial management systems to manage their finances and to provide insight into their financial habits and/or status. Currently, various computing system implemented financial management systems are available including: computing system implemented personal and small business financial management systems; online banking systems; computing system implemented tax preparation systems; computing system implemented business accounting systems; and computing system implemented medical expense management systems; as well as various other electronic transaction and spending data driven, online or desktop financial management systems.
Computing system implemented financial management systems typically help users manage their finances by providing a centralized interface with banks, credit card companies, and other various financial institutions, for identifying and categorizing user financial transactions. Currently, computing system implemented financial management systems typically obtain financial transaction information, such as payee, payment amount, date, etc. via communication with banks, credit card providers, or other financial institutions, using electronic data transfer systems such as the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) specification, or various other systems for transferring financial transaction data.
As noted above, using computing system implemented financial management systems, the financial transaction information, such as payee, payment amount, date, etc. is used by the computing system implemented financial management system to categorize individual financial transactions as a particular type of income or expense. Some currently offered computing system implemented financial management systems then use this financial transaction information to track events, such as purchase events, and to provide various financial data reports or displays including “to date” historical data reports such as historical spending data reports in particular categories and during defined timeframes.
Financial data reports produced by currently available computing system implemented financial management systems are largely automatically produced by the computing system implemented financial management systems, typically in response to general and/or specific data report parameters entered by the user, or another party. Often these financial data reports are presented in formats that typically present large amounts of data as text, or in other information intensive, but largely visually unappealing, forms. In addition, the amount of information presented in many financial data reports produced by currently available computing system implemented financial management systems often confuses the user and obscures the importance of the various data presented, with static, and often unnecessary details.
Experience has shown that, in contrast to the information displays of currently available computing system implemented financial management systems, an average user is far more likely to adopt, and continue to use, a computing system implemented financial management system, if that computing system implemented data management system provides both an intuitive display of information and a visually interesting or entertaining display of the information. While, as noted above, computing system implemented financial management systems have enjoyed a tremendous increase in popularity, current computing system implemented financial management systems typically fail to provide this visually interesting or entertaining display of the financial information element.